Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "TIKhistory" channel.

  1.  @shorewall  The biggest problem for Russia right now is that Putin's personal interests are becoming more and more divorced from Russia's actual strategic interests. We'll see what happens when he leaves the scene, which, given his age, can't be but so far off.
    1
  2. Hitler knew that invading Poland meant war with Britain and France and he did it anyway. He not only knew that, he wanted war with the Western Allies because he knew that was the only way he'd get a free hand to conquer the USSR. The blame for starting the war is 100% his. Britain didn't start any wars, it joined a war that Hitler had started.
    1
  3.  @nordlandak6853  Germany invaded Poland two days before Britain and France declared war. Germany started the war. Britain and France intervened in a war that was already underway.
    1
  4.  @6uild6ack6etter2  Which is exactly why it's so important to expose vermin who deny that it happened.
    1
  5.  @MCE851  To your parents, certainly.
    1
  6. It was okay for Britain to have an empire outside of Europe (as France, the Netherlands, Portugal, the US, and even Japan did) but not okay for anyone to dominate Europe. Sure, it's racist, but it's also rational. Britain's empire in India was no threat to anyone else in Europe. Germany building an empire in Russia and/or France was an existential threat to everyone else in Europe, and thus, the world. And you are incorrect about the start of WW1. It doesn;t make sense to you because you are ignoring the thinking and policies of Germany's military leaders, who effectively controlled foreign policy. Germany tried to keep Britain neutral, but its general staff worked very hard to make sure the Austro-Serbian crisis was fanned into a war between Germany and Russia and France, because they felt they could win that war in 1914 but in a few more years Russia's rapid modernization would make it impossible for Germany to win such a war. Read David Fromkin's Europe's Last Summer for an account of how and why the crisis played out the way it did.
    1
  7. i can understand why people are attracted to the extreme irony of "Hitler was 1/4 Jewish," but sadly, the evidence simply doesn't bear this out.
    1
  8. Hitler (like Charles Manson) would never have allowed it. And if he had, he would have lost, at least under US and, as I understand it, UK law. (Stalin, of course, didn't even want the top Nazis to get trials, he wanted them shot out of hand. And under Soviet law, the fact that the Party was prosecuting you to begin with was irrefutable proof of your guilt because the Party would never prosecute innocent people.)
    1
  9. Manpower losses yes, material losses no. Most of the Luftwaffe was slaughtered by the US and UK.
    1
  10.  @christianlibertarian5488  Modern technology in the west has a limitation that WW2 technology did not: the need to keep casualties at an absolute minimum, far beyond purely military concerns, because flag-draped coffins are bad for the re-election of politicians. Better to have 100 planes and lose two pilots than 500 planes and lose five pilots, because pictures of the five will be plastered on the front page of every newspaper in the country along with headlines demanding answers on why the pentagon considers our pilots expendable.
    1
  11.  @nikosk3080  100% bullshit.
    1
  12. I think it was a tremendous factor, I don;t know who claims otherwise. I mean, some sort of war was probably inevitable over the Balkans, but it didn't have to be a general European war, but Tirpitz' navy made Germany an inherent existential threat to the British Empire and that meant Britain could not just sit quietly by and offer financial and peripheral support to the would-be hegemon's enemies the way they had so often done in the past.
    1
  13.  @johnburns4017  British aircraft were superior to German aircraft largely because they were able to use American aviation fuel. Late model 109s and 190s with MW-50 injection could easily outperform any Spitfire using 91-octane fuel, but even as early as the BoB Spitfires weren't using 91-octane fuel. Other Merlin-powered planes like the Lancaster could likewise take advantage of the higher compression ratios made possible by American 100-octane avgas. (To be fair, American production methods for 100+ octane avgas were developed in part by a French expat engineer, but attracting the best and brightest from other countries has always been America's greatest strength.)
    1
  14. @Happy Carnivore Sure, that's what the Japanese kept saying, even after those "poor quality" American soldiers had kicked their butts all the way from Buna to Okinawa. You're good for a laugh just like they were. And outside of tiny special ops units, there was no, not one, more skilled, brave, or motivated fighting man on the planet than the United States Marine (and there still isn't).
    1
  15. @Happy Carnivore That's a laugh. US troops love bitching about their equipment, it's a national pastime. But the Sherman was arguably the best tank of WW2 and went on to own T-34/85s in Korea. There's a lot more to a good tank than statistics on paper, and ten Shermans in the field easily beat one Panther in the field plus three or four others abandoned on the road or stuck in a repair depot.
    1
  16.  @johnburns4017  The Chieftain would like a word with you.
    1
  17.  @johnburns4017  "An argument you would lose." Only in the mind of an armchair historian who has no idea about actual effectiveness as opposed to statistics on paper. As I've said before, ten Shermans in the field beat one of any other tank plus several more abandoned on the road or sitting in a repair depot.
    1
  18.  @johnburns4017  No, I just have a more realistic measure of what makes a good tank than you do. A tank that is armed and armored like a battleship but breaks down every 10 miles and wears out after two weeks is a bad tank. A tank that has middling armor and armament that accomplishes its mission 90% of the time is an excellent tank.
    1
  19.  @johnburns4017  The Matilda was an excellent tank, just too early to call it the best of the war IMO. It could never have been upgunned to deal with late war tanks. The Churchill was also an excellent design, but only in a specialized role, it was too heavy and slow to be a general-purpose tank. You can't call it versatile if it's too slow to carry out a tank's primary mission which in WW2 was to rapidly exploit breakthroughs. Guns and armor are good but for a tank mobility and reliability are more important. The Sherman was a great tank because it had an adequate gun (in the 76mm version) and armor but great mobility and fantastic reliability. It could ride in landing craft, cross bridges, and climb slopes that none of the late-war monster tanks so beloved of fanboys could even dream of. The only one in the same league was the T-34, for the same reasons, but the Sherman was considerably more reliable and easier to service than the T-34, as well as having vastly superior ergonomics (which is a field too often overlooked in evaluating tanks - a tank with a fatigued, overwhelmed, and half-blind crew is a much less effective tank). There's a reason the T-34 and Sherman were the only WW2 tanks that saw widespread use after the war, most notably in Korea. If you're looking at gun, armor, and other paper statistics, the Pershing was a fantastic tank, but in real life it was mediocre at best because, like the Panther, it was overloaded and consequently had mediocre mobility and poor reliability. The Challenger was a good design as well, but not enough were built in WW2 for it to have had much effect on the outcome of the war. But the Cromwell and Challenger were both immature designs - the really outstanding tank from that line of designs was the Centurion, which was better than any WW2 tank but didn't see combat until Korea. (It was a bit slow compared to the Sherman or T-34, but otherwise had excellent mobility.) For its time I'd say the Centurion is one of the best tanks of all time - but it wasn't around in WW2. The Firefly was also a very good tank but again built in fairly small numbers and more of a specialist than a general-purpose war-winner. The 17 pounder barely fit in the turret (sideways) and that caused serious issues for the crew trying to load and fire it and otherwise fight in the tank. Many of the overgunned late war German tanks and TDs had similar ergonomics issues.
    1
  20.  @johnburns4017  I will say you make a very strong case for the Churchill. However, while it may have been good at negotiating rough terrain, it was NOT a fast tank - its top speed was about half that of a T-34 or an Easy 8 Sherman.
    1
  21. I would dispute that either side is grounded in reality. Their departures from reality just occur in different spheres. The alt-right imagines that Donald Trump is a patriotic American and competent leader and the "you-know-Hews" are plotting to replace white people with brown people, and the alt-left imagines that Joe Biden is a competent leader, men are capable of bearing children, and socialism can possibly work. The right's fantasies are - for the moment - more dangerous, but the left's are equally absurd.
    1
  22. Depends on the type of engine. Naval engines of the day worked the same as coal ones, burning oil to heat water into steam to turn the turbines. And internal combustion engines of the day used pistons, not turbines. Gas turbine engines like we have today had yet to be invented.
    1
  23. Sure, Churchill had plenty of flaws. But he was the only man west of the Rhine in 1938 who really understood who and what Hitler was (as you still do not), and if not for his conniving, badgering, and outright bludgeoning the Conservative government to prepare for the war, and without his steadfast insistence on holding out in 1940, half of Europe might have suffered under the Nazi yoke for at least a generation, with who knows how many millions more Poles, Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, and others deemed "untermenschen" by the Nazis dead.
    1
  24.  @grantaum9677  "I wonder what, for example, the USA would do today if it had oil sanctions for holding foreign territory? Just leave its aircraft and warships to mothball, let it's economy go back to the pre-war state, I think that unlikely" You can think whatever ignorant thing you want, but the fact is that the US has faced oil embargoes in the past, most notably in 1973 over its support for Israel, and not attacked the OPEC states to steal their oil by force.
    1
  25. Naval rearmament was a very different thing, against Germany that would be read as defensive whereas air forces were seen at the time as mostly offensive in nature and army rearmament would very obviously be aimed directly at Germany. Once the UK was committed in WW1 staying off the continent wasn't really an option, without large-scale British help the Germans would have defeated both France and Russia and that would have been it. War had changed since 1805 when it was very difficult for Napoleon to control the countries he conquered which meant no victory of his was likely to be permanent.
    1
  26. I mean, by spring of 1945 he was a druggy-madman, but that was almost a different world from 1939.
    1
  27.  @louisgiokas2206  Patton knew a lot more about tanks than about politics. The people of the US and UK would never have stood for a war of aggression in 1945 against the country that their own governments' propaganda had been telling them for four years was an ally in the fight for freedom.
    1
  28.  @insideoutsideupsidedown2218  The UK and France declared war on Germany as a response to years of aggression against its neighbors and broken promises about preserving the peace. It wasn't about protecting Poland, Poland was just the ultimate line the UK and France drew against German aggression. The pact didn't require the UK and France to go to war with anyone who attacked Poland, only Germany. The UK had never declared preservation of the 1920s borders in all of Europe as a vital national interest, but it did regard preventing Germany from overrunning all of central and eastern Europe as a vital strategic interest, as did France.
    1
  29. And how was he supposed to do that without a meaningful navy? He couldn't even supply a relatively small army in Egypt properly.
    1
  30. They tried doing exactly that, the problem was that after the slaughter of the Western Front there just wasn't any popular support for Britain herself to get dragged into another war, and the Greeks and Italians proved incapable of winning the resulting war against the nationalist Turks on their own. The same was true for Operation Unthinkable - which in any case was a contingency plan in case Stalin made war unavoidable, not something they hoped to put into operation. As to the first, it does make you wonder what the world might look like today if Admiral de Robeck hadn't lost his nerve and had been willing to take the loss of a few worthless and obsolete pre-dreadnoughts in stride and push through to Constantinople in March, 1915.
    1
  31. The problem with the American torpedoes wasn't that they were technologically obsolete, it was that they were too cheap to test them to get the bugs worked out. Once that was done they performed just fine.
    1
  32.  @larrypage2793  It didn't. It operated in the government's interest. Any benefits that came to the workers did so only to the extent the Nazis thought it would make them more productive in support of the war effort.
    1
  33. And his reputation has suffered accordingly. However, Ambrose's falsehoods weren't in service of a genocidal ideology.
    1
  34.  @vladimirrodionov5391  Defund the police? No thank you, we've seen where that's led - a 30% increase in violent crime. And it's not the police who have failed, it's the politicians who have failed to allow them to do their job.
    1
  35. I'm sure they'd like to believe that, the problem is that a very reliable 1st century source, Josephus, reported it is a movement originating out of Judaism. There is, of course, little doubt that it was strongly influenced by Greek philosophy and by other mystery cults, but then, Judaism was also strongly influenced by other religions, particularly Persian religion. The Judaism of Jesus day was very different from anything believed or practiced in Judah in 600 BC (and also very different in some respects from modern Judaism - and Christianity developed out of that different Judaism, not out of the version we have today).
    1
  36. "The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind." - Sir Arthur Harris
    1
  37. It's even harder to be an ancap after receiving a university education in history, economics, or political science. Libertoons are like flat earthers, they think that having an education and actually understanding the subject disqualifies one from speaking on it. "If that micro state then uses its power to force others into, it is no longer ancap." Right. And that's why ancap, like anarcho-syndicalism, exists only in theory. Because there will always be someone to form a larger, more rapacious system and absorb it.
    1
  38.  @PhillyPhanVinny  That was a politically motivated fiction that served everyone's interests except the South Vietnamese people's. The Republicans could claim they had a achieved a victory LBJ had failed to win, the Democrats could turn the public's focus back to domestic affairs they cared a lot more about than they had ever cared about fighting communism, the antiwar crowd could say "Hey, we won, we don't have to pay any more attention to what's going on there," the military could deflect criticism and attention from its massive internal (chiefly social and morale) problems, and newspapers always sell more copies making people feel good about themselves than the reverse. It's a bit like all the UK newspapers that hailed the Munich Agreement as a massive success for Chamberlain and appeasement, and didn't want to listen to that cranky and politically incorrect backbencher who said it just made war more inevitable and sooner rather than later.
    1
  39.  @circleofsorrow4583  I'm curious how old you are. I served in the US Navy in the mid 1980s, and it and the other services were only just recovering from the massive social and morale problems they faced in the 1970s as well as the severe underfunding resulting from the public's post-Vietnam anti-militarism. The state of readiness of our military, particularly the Army, under the Carter administration was pathetic, as shown by the Desert One debacle. I'm not knocking the people who served in those years, against all odds and on a shoestring budget they kept the professional pride and knowledge alive until they could pass the torch to a new generation untainted by the 70s rot who could hold our heads high and be proud of our service and our traditions, but our military came out of Vietnam much, much weaker than it went in. And in the 1970s it looked and acted very much like a military that had lost a major war and felt completely unsupported, disrespected, and even spat on by the civilian population.
    1
  40. There's actually some truth to that. The Nazis had some rational war aims but their overall policy can only really be understood if you understand their fundamentally irrational, romantic world-view.
    1
  41.  @wtice4632  Or perhaps the Bolsheviks and their puppet governments were also not really leftists in practice by 1945, but solely concerned with their own power as Orwell described.
    1
  42. I'm confused by this comment. Yes, the British and Commonwealth contribution to D-day was massive and vital, but weren't most of the landing craft LCVPs ("Higgins boats") that were manufactured in the US, even if they were under British control?
    1
  43. Hitler's propaganda intended to justify a German invasion of Poland in 1939 sounds almost exactly like Putin's propaganda trying to justify his invasion of Ukraine earlier this year. History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Sadly, just as many people seem inclined to turn their brains off and swallow this nonsense today as Germans and their sympathizers were in 1939.
    1
  44.  @Tokinjester  "Hitler sent two emissaries to meet with British diplomats in a bid to stop the war from starting" Bullsh1t. Hitler sent emissaries to meet with British diplomats in an attempt to persuade Britain not to interfere in the war Hitler planned to start. That is not remotely the same thing, and you'd have to be exceptionally naive and/or stupid to think it is. (I don't think you're stupid, btw, I think you're naive, dishonest, and extremely biased.) Hitler wanted to divide his enemies in order to conquer each of them one at a time. But he knew from the start that a war with France, at least, was certainly inevitable given his expansionist aims, and he welcomed it - again, he just wanted to fight that war on terms favorable to Germany.
    1
  45.  @Tokinjester  I have. I read his silly book, or as much of it as I could stomach, anyway.
    1
  46. What makes you say they didn't in Spain or France? Spanish and French are both Romance languages just like Romanian is, directly descended from Latin. Egypt and the southern Balkans had already become Greek-speaking with an extremely ancient, prolific, and robust literary culture and thus did not become Latinized. And the Dacian language is not very well attested but it absolutely is not related to Latin other than being an Indo-European language. Latin is indisputably an Italian language, one of many that developed in Italy in the 1st millennium BC. Dacian is probably more closely related to other nearby IE languages - Albanian, Illyrian, or Thracian. I find it hilarious how every country in the Balkans has its own claim to be the original cradle of civilization and the natural master of all the others. The state of modern cultures there must be quite pathetic to generate such a profound need to invent such an absurd fantasy past. Whatever gets you through the night, I guess, but don't mistake it for anything resembling actual history or reality.
    1
  47. The point stands - it was pronounced kentum by the Romans and the pronunciation and spelling changed slightly in all the succeeding Romance languages.
    1
  48. @Pep The US Army was tiny in the 1930s. It was smaller than Portugal's. The US had a sizeable navy, but it was smaller than it had been in 1918, largely because the US and UK had pushed very hard for naval limitations treaties in the 1920s and 30s. Anyway a big navy isn't much use for aggressive war if you're thousands of miles from your main rivals and your army and marine corps are the size and strength of the police force of a sleepy rural town.
    1
  49. You may not have noticed, but the Anglo forces won the Battle of the Bulge. In fact, it was a catastrophic defeat for Germany.
    1
  50.  @dylanmurphy9389  No, but it's the term pretty much every historian uses for them.
    1